Author: TechCrunch News

Ethiopian startup eQub is the winner of the fintech pitch-off at 4YFN 2024, Mobile World Congress’ startup event. TechCrunch was on the ground in Barcelona to meet its business development lead Nahom Michael this week. The startup’s name is an Amharic word referring to a local form of peer-to-peer credit, Michael said. An Equb is…

Out of the box, Apple’s Vision Pro doubles as a 4K Mac virtual display, allowing you to extend an existing Mac desktop to the device’s spatial computing environment. A new app called Splitscreen takes things a step further, by allowing you to add a second macOS display to your Vision Pro — even if it…

Biotech startup SynFlora brought an enticing pitch for a new type of skin treatment technology to 4YFN at the MWC tradeshow in Barcelona this week. The Spanish startup, whose three co-founders all have PhDs, is working to improve understanding of the skin’s microbiome and engineer skin microbes with the goal of enabling more targeted and…

Apple is scuttling its secretive, long-running effort to build an autonomous electric car, executives announced in a short meeting with the team Tuesday morning. The company is likely cutting hundreds of employees from the team and all work on the project has stopped, TechCrunch has learned. Some remaining employees will be shifted to Apple’s generative…

TikTok is losing even more songs over its quarrel with Universal Music Group (UMG), as the social media network is starting to remove songs published by UMG, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Tuesday. The row between the two companies began last month when UMG announced that it failed to reach a deal with TikTok’s…

As humans spend increasing amounts of time indoors, we lose access to the sun’s natural benefits. Recognition of season affective disorder has grown accordingly. While the actual occurrence of the condition is low (around 5% — or 10 million or so Americans),  it’s led to increasing awareness of the sun’s impact on the production of…

TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares and I covered…

Stellantis, the automaker that owns 14 brands including Chrysler, Jeep and Ram, and autonomous vehicle technology company Waymo are not only still working together, the companies are deepening the partnership, CEO Carlos Tavares told TechCrunch in a recent interview. This “deepened” partnership will focus on commercial self-driving Ram delivery vans, a target that was first…

Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Weekend team, we have something both short and sweet for you: A dig into the Reddit IPO filing that came out just after we recorded our final,…

Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering noteworthy happenings in the tech industry. This week, Google launched two new open large language models, Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, in its continued bid for generative AI dominance. The company, which describes the LLMs as “inspired by Gemini,” its flagship family of GenAI…